Of those rumours he tells Versace: "I don't know what will happen. Sincerely, I feel sorry for John. But for this moment I am leaving aside all the gossip of 'I am going here, I am going there,' because there is a lot of gossip circulating and there always will be. I will tell you, in this moment, I am very happy at Givenchy and it is a moment in which I am bringing the game to the next level.

"When I arrived here at Givenchy, there was a lot of confusion," he continues. "Before me, there had been some great geniuses - John Galliano and Alexander McQueen are great masters. They marked history. But when I came in after Julien Macdonald, it was also a bit of a mess, because not even I could understand what the true identity of Givenchy was."

Tisci has been at Givenchy since 2005, where he was a controversial choice to take over the couture house at the time, given he had only two collections to his name. He was widely rumoured to be taking the helm at Christian Dior following
John Galliano's departure
in April.

"In spite of the fact that everyone thinks I am very much a Rottweiler - that I am very dark and everything - I have a side that is very romantic that I show to very few people."

Steven Klein obviously took the first part of that quote very much to heart for his creative direction in the accompanying photo-shoot: capturing the designer blood-spattered, hoisting a Rottweiler over his shoulders. (Klein has previously shot Justin Timberlake bloodied and bruised, and Brad Pitt face-down on a concrete floor when the actor was promoting
Fight Club
).

Tisci grew up with his mother and eight sisters in southern Italy, which shaped his path into fashion, he says.

"Imagine all these sisters. Eight women of all different shapes and lifestyles. So my path was pretty peculiar. Even at the beginning when I arrived at Givenchy, there were certainly people who supported me, but not everyone loved me. They were saying, 'Why an Italian who acts Gothic?'"

It was in London, where he studied at Central St Martins, that Tisci honed his "dark" aesthetic, he says. In England he was "traumatised, in a positive way. It was that British sense of transgression and the dark," adding "…I love all that is transgressive or vulgar."

It is Tisci who brought the debate about gender identity into the fashion conversation again, casting his assistant and sometime muse Lea T, the transgender model, in his autumn/winter advertising campaign last year.

Lea T now has a stellar career as model, posing for French
Vogue
,
Love
magazine and
Vanity Fair
.

Interview
magazine says of Tisci's career, "among the crop of sartorial prodigies to have emerged in recent years, none has ascended from young upstart to master of the universe as rapidly as 36-year-old Italian designer Riccardo Tisci."